Neither of my parents took much interest in my frame of mind. Father was preoccupied with business and I cannot to this day fathom what Mother did with her time. She had a live-in maid and a full-time cook to run the house, one self-absorbed son and a husband who seldom came home. How did she amuse herself? With a Wednesday lover in a Berkshire inn? I doubt it. Middle-class Jewish women in those prim, pre-Pill times had too much to lose in status and comfort to risk a scandal. Divorce amounted to disgrace, a state worse than poverty. Mother maintained a diary of coffee mornings, women’s lunches, bridge parties and refugee committees in which to sublimate her vital urges. Sad, really. Had she taken a lover, some of the love he aroused in her might have come my way, if only by osmosis. I longed for a show of maternal warmth. Mother longed for a son she could show off to Lady Rothschild, the Poet Laureate and the Chief Rabbi’s wife. Our longings were mutually unrequited.

Strong-boned and with a cut-glass voice, Mother held herself with an hauteur that suggested she had come down in the world through no fault of her own. She wore gloves at all times out of doors, to avoid contamination by sub speciae humanitas (her Latin was pure, her Spanish immaculate). In concerts she would not deign to remove a glove to turn a programme page or offer applause. Her hauteur eased only in high society, when it turned obsequious: would the titled ones recognise her for what she really thought she was? She lived in fear of ‘the Wood’, where we were parvenus – my parents having moved up from suburban Finchley in 1932 shortly after the famous record studios opened on Abbey Road. Mother held open house to artists, whom Father escorted to their dates with destiny, but there was a taint of ‘trade’ about her and she craved the approval of the district’s grand ladies whose husbands did not have to work for a living.

Her parental approach mixed distaste with disappointment. ‘Martin, why can’t you knot a tie in such a way that it sits closer to your throat than your thorax? Come here, boy. Let me adjust it once and for all. Spend an extra minute at the mirror before you leave the house in the morning and you might one day turn into an acceptable member of society. Lord knows, I have done my best to make you presentable. Stand still, and stop making those gagging noises.’

It was not just her impatient hand on my trachea that made me choke but something in her very being, an icy mist of frustration that came off her like morning haze off an Arctic lake. I physically feared her embrace, not that she often offered it.